AdWords Express: To Do or To Don’t

Though this marketing strategy is starting to show its age, PPC, or Pay-Per-Click, Advertising Campaigns are still one of the most effectives tools available for marketing. These campaigns not only target specific customers, they also allow a potentially maximum return on investment by only allocating funds to quality traffic. The most intelligent and widely used digital advertising platforms today is Google AdWords. This platform allows business owners and marketers to create and manage brief advertisements, services offerings, and other content within the Google Search Network to users.

Creating and managing a Google AdWords campaign for your business is challenging, taxing, and takes up more time than an average business owner has to spend on their own marketing. Many business owners either hand it to their own in house marketing department or elect to go to a third party digital marketing firm to ensure that it is handle efficiently and properly.

But for small business owners that do not have their own marketing team or have the allocated funds to put toward a advertising management fee, many find themselves relying on Google AdWords Express. This platform is designed to simplify the Google AdWords Platform by automatically managing your online ads. Its promises of reaching more customers and quick set-up attracts many.

Many business owners that seek our advertising services come to us with frustration, an empty wallet, and confused as to why they are only breaking even on their efforts with Google AdWords Express. Seeing your business at the top of the search results is not only promising but has the potential to create big business, but not without paying big bucks to do so.

So What Makes AdWords Express Different from AdWords?

No Control Over Your Keywords in Express

Keywords are the key to Google’s algorithm and they define how users find your business. They also find the right users and produce quality traffic to your site. Hence the saying, “wrong keywords = wrong traffic”. Google AdWords platform allows to define your keywords and will only bid on the ones you indicated in the system.

On Google AdWords Express, it does a “broad match” search. This allows your ads to appear on keywords that are similar to the ones selected from their list. It gives Google the freedom to show your ads where they want in efforts to obtain maximum exposure. We all know that reach does not always result in engagement or conversion.

On a similar note, you also cannot view the actual search terms the user search to get to your site in Express like you can on Google AdWords. So there is little to no way of knowing what keywords are working.

No Control Over Your Spend in Express

In Google AdWords, there are several different bid strategies that establish how you pay for viewer interaction with your ads.This includes automatic, max-click campaigns, profitier, and others. It gives you several ways to control your budget and spending to ensure you don’t end up investing thousands of dollars more than you intended. You also are able to define and bid on specific keywords that you are targeting.

AdWords Express will first give you broad category matches for your business, such as language, service industry, and type of audience. From there, they will generate a list of broad match keywords from which you are to choose from. You choose your keywords that you will bid on and let it roll! You are not able to specify how much money you want to bid on certain keywords, which gives Google full access to your wallet to do what needs to be done. It can easily lead to higher cost-per-clicks and spending money on tons of keywords that aren’t converting.

Remember: Google is a business too. It may be smart, but it’s even smarter on how to take your money without you realizing it.

There are many other differences between Google AdWords and AdWords Express including negative keywords and extensions. Express does not allow you to add any negative keywords, or keywords that you do not want you business to appear for. It also does not give you access to extensions such as callouts, sitelinks, and structured snippets. What may seem like minor details, can make you stand out from the pack of advertisers that sit at the top of the Google search page.

AdWords Express is a very quick, simple process to advertise on Google. If you don’t have the time to manage your own AdWords account and have an unlimited access to funds, it may be right for you. But for business owners that are looking to maximize their ROI and grow as a business, managing a AdWords account is the much more logical choice.

If you don’t have the time to manage your own advertising account, but would like a higher ROI on your paid advertisements, find a professional digital marketing firm, like Blue Ridge Media Company, to management your AdWords account.